Fair Warning - Dialects, egg shapes, and the race to 2020

Hey! It’s Sunday! I’ve spent the morning listening to recommendations from Flow State, one of the few newsletters I sign up to. I’m always grateful when I have the excuse to listen to the links in the newsletter. They make me feel peaceful AND productive! Today I’m all about Music for Nine Post Cards by Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Surely everyone and their mum has done this by now, and while I usually try to reserve this space for a British take on something involving Britain, I had to make an exception. Personally, I am a bit upset at where it put me, which is funny because as a Londoner I would really have thought mine is simple? It put me somewhere between Oxford and Peterborough. Buddy, that ain’t it.

Just your basic run-of-the-mill ‘how did my MP vote’ on, you know, one of the most important issues facing the country right now. Both of mine (to be clear, I obviously only have one MP, but I still find myself curious about the MP I grew up knowing) voted against.

This is funny. I know this road inside out and it’s a complete nightmare, to the point that my mother point blank refuses to drive on it and will spend 20 minutes going out of her way to find another route. I feel kind of proud that my anecdotal experience is literally backed up by data. #anecdata!

This remarkable project was written by student journalists, who tell the stories of the American children killed by gun violence since the Parkland school shooting last year. The children are each put into categories like artists, athletes, jokesters, young parents, etc.

I love step charts (please correct me if they are not called this) - they tend to get used for when politicians do things like resign or, in this case, enter into the race for President. It’s a really good way to compare the current situation with how things have panned out before.

This is about how US households have changed over the years, really. Most people live there in single-person households now. I was trying to think off the top of my head what I know about the UK. In places like London, young people can’t afford to form single-person households, but that’s about all I can say for sure without doing further research (and I have been down enough rabbit holes for one day thank you).

Have you ever wondered why an egg is shaped the way it is? I can’t say that I have specifically sat and thought about it but I suppose at some point in my life I have, maybe when I first encountered an egg. Um, anyway, this is a nice scrolling story that has data, and is nerdy and extremely niche, like all good things, and I liked it.

Rob Weychert is a music nerd living in Brooklyn, and he has recorded every single concert he’s been to since 1992, by artist, state, city, genre and venue. I don’t know about you, but I love seeing how people record their own lives. It definitely tells you something about the things they value.

There have been a few of these temperature-since-1900 things, but I don’t think* I’ve seen this exact one before, and I like it. *I have a notoriously unreliable memory, so the chances are I have seen it but I have erased it from my memory.

I don’t really know how to explain this so I’ll use the words on the site: “Vocal bursts are plotted along the 24 dimensions of emotion they can reliably convey.” It’s intriguing, disturbing, and fascinating all at once. H/T to Web Curios

I don’t really know why I always find myself surprised at how historical cultural connections can influence how people vote… I suppose it’s fascinating because it speaks to the impact of whatever happened, that people still diverge so much. Anyway, someone superimposed the border of the Second Polish Republic on the electoral results of the elections in Ukraine and Lithuania, and it is… really striking.

Creepy as hell and a testament to how far machine learning/AI has come. None of the people that come up (press refresh) are actually real people. ARGH. Some are glitchy and weird nightmare fuel though!

You’ve probably all seen it by now, but this Captain Marvel website genuinely took me back to being about 12, when I was teaching myself HTML and CSS and I thought the marquee tag was the coolest thing ever. I even had a guestbook. Oh my.

There are a couple of things here (who knew 18-year-olds are still in nappies?) but mostly pie charts with different graphics in the slices. 😬My well-publicised hatred of pie charts is extreme but I think others would agree with me. Don’t do this! This is what words and legends are for!

A weekly newsletter with anywhere between 10 and 20 links about data journalism, data visualisation, and storytelling, curated by a British data journalist and nerd. Expect politics, statistics, society and culture - all through the frame of data... With a dash of whimsy.